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The Supreme injustice

George Bush might bang on about bringing justice and democracy to the world, but the message from the American judicial system is far from encouraging - and most certainly no lesson for any country to take on board let alone adopt.

This IHT opinion piece hits the mark as it very rightly challenges the injustice - and disgrace as it calls it - of the US Supreme Court's decision not to hear an appeal from a lower court which goes to the very heart of justice for an innocent man wrongly kidnapped by the US, rendered and then imprisoned without charge before being released:

"The Supreme Court exerts leadership over America's justice system, not just through its rulings, but also by its choice of cases - the ones it agrees to hear and the ones it declines. On Tuesday, it led in exactly the wrong direction.

Somehow the court could not muster the four votes needed to grant review in the case of an innocent German citizen of Lebanese descent who was kidnapped, detained and tortured in a secret overseas prison as part of the Bush administration's morally, physically and legally abusive anti-terrorism program. The victim, Khaled el-Masri, was denied justice by lower federal courts, which dismissed his civil suit in a reflexive bow to a flimsy government claim that allowing the case to go forward would put national security secrets at risk.

Those rulings, Masri's lawyers correctly argued, represented a major distortion of the state secrets doctrine, a rule created by the federal courts that was originally intended to shield specific evidence in a lawsuit filed against the government. It was never designed to dictate dismissal of an entire case before any evidence is produced."

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